London Urban Legends (25 page)

That all of these stories involve an accident having such a sudden effect on our environment, like a clumsy rock legend, an aviary smashed in an historic storm or a tanker running aground, says a lot more about the human need for narrative than it does about Anglo-Indian parakeets. The numbers and visibility of this relatively new arrival must, it seems, indicate that they come from one event or source: a disaster, an exotic recreation of Africa on a film set, or a rock star opening up his window and sending out bright-coloured birds across the city. The banal explanation of cage and aviary escapees, with long lifespans and fruitful breeding cycles, adapting to our environment does not satisfy.

An article from
ES Magazine
in 2012 on cosmopolitan south London described the parakeets as ‘cheeky birds’ and as a ‘cheery sight in parks from Greenwich to Brixton to Richmond’, while the book
Fauna Britannica
has the Spickett family of Twickenham describing them as ‘invading Benfleet more than thirty years ago’ and records their glee at a pair being mobbed out of a spruce tree by the local magpies.
The Times
, perhaps with its tongue in its cheek, fears that the parakeets are almost a harbinger of environmental and immigration doom. The parakeets are ‘the latest, and loudest, evidence of global warming’ as well as ‘[…] further disquieting proofs of shifts in the natural world: ornithologists fear that these parakeets – robust, adaptable and aggressive – will impinge on the habitat of indigenous species such as starlings, kestrels and little owls.’

Fear not for our little owls just yet though. The RSPB’s policy on parakeets, last updated in 2009, does not offer any evidence that parakeets are a threat to other species, nor does a 2011 article published in
Ibis: The International Journal of Avian Science
. Others differ, and in 2011, DEFRA instigated a cull of Monk Parakeets to stop the £1.7 billion-a-year damage they allegedly cause to the British economy.

These out-of-place, bright birds couldn’t have as mundane an origin as London’s iconic pigeons, which are also feral animals with similar origins. The rock pigeon’s native environment is the western coast of Britain. Our London version is descended from domesticated rock doves that have escaped their coops and turned feral on London’s streets, buildings and parks. They have been in London for a long time; so long, infact, that they are very much a part of London’s landscape. Fourteenth-century Londoners threw so many stones at pigeons that they would break the windows of St Paul’s, and Pepys pitied them during the Great Fire of London. They have been with us so long they no longer need a story to explain their presence, unlike the parakeet.

Parakeets have appeared in the UK under much stranger circumstances than being celebrity escapees: in 1895,
The Field
magazine reported a parakeet sighting in a farmyard in Gledfield, Scotland, two years after another parakeet had visited. No one local had claimed to have lost a parakeet.

Crack Squirrels and Squirrats

If the poor rat and feral parakeet are abused for the purpose of demonstrating the corrupting effects city living has on nature, then please pity the poor grey squirrels. Dubbed and damned as ‘tree rats’ for their bird-table raiding ways and being a large immigrant from America that has driven the indigenous red squirrel to the far corners of the kingdom, in summer 2007 the
Sun
newspaper accused them of a much closer relationship with London’s rats. On 31 July it published a photograph of a squirrel with a bare, rat-like tail, taken by central London artist Sia Sumaria. The next day Tom Crew photographed a rat-tailed squirrel on his tree-lined road in Dulwich. Had squirrels and rats interbred to produce ‘squirrats’ – a fearless urban hybrid?

‘The one I saw wasn’t afraid of anything and seemed quite tame,’ said Mr Crew. ‘Most squirrels dart up a tree when you approach them, but this breed is very confident and stood its ground. I’ve seen a whole family of them in my road. The hairless tail makes them look so strange.’

Unnamed experts suggested that squirrels and rats cannot interbreed and instead of a cross-rodent love-in, the squirrats are simply squirrels with a diseased, bare tail.

Possibly not quite as bad as rutting with rats is the suggestion on the front page of the
South London Press
on 7 October 2005 that the grey squirrels of Brixton were crackheads. It quoted a local resident who ‘did not wish to be named’ who had seen an ill-looking squirrel with bloodshot eyes digging in his garden. An hour later, a neighbour informed him that local crack dealers and users had been using his front garden to hide their rocks of crack.

The rest is left to the reader’s imagination. Such a weak story was still quirky enough to make the
Daily Mirror
, the
Guardian
and the squirrel-damning
Sun
. By 18 October,
Fox News
in the US were repeating the story of London’s crack squirrels with a mention of a footnote in the
South London Press
’ story that crack squirrels were already a problem in New York and Washington DC. Squirrels on crack even made it into the BBC adult puppet show about urban animals,
Mongrels
.

So, squirrels of London, please tell us straight, we don’t need to know about the rat sex, but do you have a crack problem?

Researching the story for a
Fortean Times
article, Ben Austwick found a location for the original, unnamed source for the story. On 3 October 2005, a user on the Urban 75 South London web forum began a post that began by matching the report in the
South London Press
. The user posted about dealers and users hiding their stash and squirrels, which were not ill-looking or bloodshot-eyed, that had been digging in their garden, and then they joked about the squirrel mistaking a rock of crack for a nut or acorn: ‘But what if they did? And do I face the prospect of dreaded crack squirrels? Turf wars (flower bed wars) between dealers and squirrels?’

A joke on an internet forum was picked up by a journalist on a local London newspaper who fitted it into a news story. This is why there is no positive sighting of a squirrel chewing on crack; the original poster did not describe it and the journalist chose not to invent that part. Perhaps that would have been too dishonest.

The Spider in the Supermarket

A popular urban legend from the 1980s, which is currently dormant, is the tale of the squeaking pot plant. It was brought home and, in one version, made squeaking noises when watered, which the woman plant owner thought was the sound of air escaping from the dried pot as the water went in. Then the earth began to shift around the base of the plant, and so she called the police. In turn, the police called the local zoo who removed a large female tarantula and her nest of fifty youngsters. In the London version the spider is discovered at Kew Gardens. Kew’s plant inspector, Jim Kessing, said, ‘One of our gardeners said it happened to a friend of his son’s. He asked me if it was possible. I told him it was – but a bit unlikely.’ Tom Kelly, the manager of the Marks & Spencer Oxford Circus branch, lamented in 1985 that ‘it’s getting beyond a joke. Now we’ve got an official complaint from the Irish Ministry of Agriculture because someone in Dublin claims one of our people offered a woman £100 to keep it quiet!’ Was that in cash or M&S vouchers? This story was so popular that it made the cover of Paul Smith’s
The Book of Nastier Legends
in 1986, passing from person to person in a crowded pub. On the record, Marks & Spencer denied the possibility of illegal immigrant spider families invading London hidden in pot plants, as the African yuccas were all replanted in the Netherlands before arriving in our supermarkets.

Baby spiders feature in another 1970s and ’80s urban legend that addresses the danger of travel and foreign lands, with the tale of the girl being bitten while on holiday on the coast of North Africa, or being bitten while on the plane heading home to London. In a Glaswegian version the bites fester until the girl goes to wash her wound and, positioned in front of a mirror to gain maximum horror, her face erupts with baby spiders.

Whilst that story is thankfully not true, a similar legend of tarantulas lurking in supermarket bananas is something that really does happen. On 4 June 2013, Mark Drinkwater was shopping at a Lidl in Sydenham. He reached into a banana box and out came a large spider attached to a bunch of bananas. He told the
News Shopper
on 13 June:

It was the size of the palm of my hand. It was hairy. It was scary enough. I shook the banana and the tarantula fell back into the box. It probably wasn’t very happy having been thrown back in the box. At the time I didn’t panic, I was relatively calm, but later I could feel my heart beating through my chest. I decided not to buy the bananas.

He informed Lidl staff that there was a possible tarantula in the box and there followed a fine piece of improvisation: staff located the largest Tupperware bowl they could find and trapped the beast. Mr Drinkwater was put off buying bananas for a few weeks.

I emailed Lidl press and public relations office, and PR Manager Clare Norman confirmed the story and continued it. The ‘unidentified spider’ (Clare’s words) was contained in the shop’s disposal freezer while the RSPCA was contacted. They suggested Lidl contact the British Arachnological Society, who advised the staff to keep the spider in the freezer ‘for a length of time’ until it could be ‘subsequently disposed of’.

I had to double check what that meant and it turns out that the best way to deal with a tarantula, which is how the spider was referred to in my second email from Clare Norman, is to freeze it. The freezer was their animal by-products freezer, which presumably, is where all the remains from the butchers’ counter go so they do not decay too unpleasantly until they can be disposed of properly. The animal by-products service provider took the contents of the freezer, tarantula and all, and incinerated it. Just in case I did feel sad for the tarantula, who was a long way from home, Clare did reassure me that during incineration ‘the energy from it is then used for electricity and other renewable energies.’ I now think of the spider whenever I switch on the kettle to make a cup of tea.